History Quotes - Page 51

Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present.

[The Euclidean algorithm is] the granddaddy of all algorithms, because it is the oldest nontrivial algorithm that has survived to the present day.

World War II proved a hypothesis that Alexis de Tocqueville advanced a century before: the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest when war is most intense; at its weakest when war is most limited. This is a lesson with enduring relevance to our own times - and our own wars.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

I'm somebody who is very, very proud to have been a part of the British film industry all my life and to have kind of been involved with a very important piece of British film history.

The Victorians pioneered numbers of commercial rackets about which their descendants complain (the manufacturers of Bovril, it appears, were virtually official sponsors of the Boer War).

The doctrine of the absolute uniqueness of events in history seems nonsense.

The fuhrer of the Third Reich has freed the German man from his external humiliation and from the inner weakness caused by Marxism - and has returned him to the ancestral Germanic values of honor, loyalty and courage.

90 percent of my time is spent on 10 percent of the world.

you must take the problem as it is, and let it be what it wants to be.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is defeated.

All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!

Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Without passion there might be no errors, but without passion there would certainly be no history.

I counted them all out and I counted them all back.

In the United States those bits of our history that remain are paved over, sanitized, packaged for easy consumption. At those sites not already lost to commercial development, we walk between velvet ropes, herded by guides, warned not to touch. Our icons are preserved under glass, their magic demystified in glossy brochures.

I've never cared that much for cementing my place in history. Sports is so transitory, so ephemeral. It just seems like so much nonsense comparing me to Helen Wills Moody or Suzanne Lenglen or anybody else from some other time. One lesson you learn from sports is that life goes on without you.

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

At various periods in American history, people get pretty rambunctious when it comes to our democratic debate.

The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.

When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it.

That great dust-heap called 'history'.

I am far too much in doubt about the present, far too perturbed .about the future, to be otherwise than profoundly reverential about the past.

nd now that man's history has been for the first time systematically considered as a whole, and has been found to be, like all other phenomena, subject to invariable laws, the preparatory labours of modern Science are ended.

The whole point of society is to be less unforgiving than nature.